This invention is directed to a food press for preheating and placement on top of food items such as, for example, hamburger, bacon, sausages; steaks or chicken breasts, located on a cooking grill, so as to hold the food item down and to cook the top of the food item while the cooking grill is cooking the food item from the bottom.
Most of the presses which are presently on the market are designed to put weight on the meat, hamburger or bacon in order to hold it down on the grill. Such presses have little thermal capacity and do not supply sufficient heat to accomplish cooking from the top.
Another prior art device, shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,170,933 and 4,217,817, has a floating plate with many holes in it. The plate is floating with respect to another member which carries pins which can extend down through the holes in the plate. It is intended that the pins penetrate the hamburger patty to transfer heat into the hamburger for cooking. However, in modern short-order hamburger grilling, the hamburger patty is frozen and the top plate does not have sufficient thermal capacity so that the pins do not penetrate the frozen meat. After the hamburger is turned over and the cooking process is almost complete, then the pins finally penetrate. Also, that device sacrifices juiciness because a lot of juice is lost, probably from the pins penetrating the hamburger patty. The loss of juice is seen from the steam escaping from the unit. As a result, the hamburgers, are less tender, less juicy and usually shrink more than without the use of the grilling device of the present invention.
Another problem with the aforementioned prior device is that it cannot be scraped clean because of the holes and the pins. As a result, it is often encrusted and, as a result, does not really transfer as much energy as it could to the hamburger patty. Also, the prior art hamburger presses do not deal with the problem of insufficient thermal capacity to accomplish cooking a frozen hamburger patty from the top.